Sarah Wayne Callies quotes:

Your work isn't just to learn and say the lines. Your work is to figure out what the chatter in your brain is, that's going on under the lines. It doesn't matter whether you're speaking or not speaking because your mind is working the way your character's mind would work.

The rite of passage of learning to build a fire that will burn all night with one match is not an insignificant one in my husband's family, and I grew up camping and backpacking. I love to camp.

I'm learning to hunt with rifles, because if you think about it, hunting gets you the healthiest meat - organic, free-range food. It's a totally yuppie spin on what I thought was kind of a redneck occupation.

My husband's family is military. Preparation is just, from that family perspective, it's just a part of what makes sense to do. You buy insurance for your house; you have a go bag.

Every working mom I know is constantly walking some kind of a tightrope of guilt.

One thing that annoys me is when you see women in these terrible and incredible situations with perfectly glossed lips. You're not going to look good in the apocalypse.

Hospitals are great places, and you can learn from them, but you don't necessarily need to go in anytime you get the sniffles. And maybe you shouldn't treat pregnancy as a disease.

I watched Ricki Lake's documentary, 'The Business of Being Born,' and that led me to call a midwife, and not an ob-gyn, when I found out I had conceived. My delivery was not easy - they call it 'labor,' not 'a vacation!' - but I was incredibly grateful that I did it that way.

An actor without an audience is rehearsing.

Well, I do lie for a living. I'm an actor.

I don't watch horror movies because they scare me!

Learning to shoot firearms to me is a little like driving stick - it seems like a decent skill to have.

I think I'm probably much better at the boots and pocket knife thing than I am at the high heels and martini thing.

You don't take a job in acting at all expecting 25 years in and a pension.

I am fascinated in religion and theology and what people believe.

I love doing action scenes, there's that great thing when you sort of stop acting because if you're running, you're not acting like you're running, you are just actually running.

I think intimacy is a word that's used more physically than it needs to be. There are times in your life, sometimes it's when you fall in love with someone and sometimes it's when someone saves your life.

I'm growing as an artist and expanding my range,and not pigeonholing myself by doing the same thing, over and over.

What serialized cable dramas have given us is the opportunity to not simply tell the same story with slightly different words and different costumes, every week. people are really mining the ability of storytellers to tell a long form story that goes from A to Z, and to trust that an audience will follow that. If they miss it, over the course of the week, they can watch it online or buy the DVD. There are so many different ways of interacting with it. Storytelling in television is getting more complex and more nuanced.